So while at college, I did work fifteen hours a week in the library to earn basic pocket money. During grad school at Harvard, I taught an introductory freshman course in English composition to augment the fellowship stipend. And because everything had to be so carefully budgeted in my life, I became very adept at living on very little. After my tuition and books, the fellowship paid me $700 per month. My studio apartment cost me just over $500 – and once the fee I received for teaching that freshman composition course was factored in, I was left with just under $400 a month for everything to do with the business of day-to-day life. I cooked most of my meals at home. I bought clothes at discount outlets. I could easily afford to see two movies a week. The T got me around Cambridge and into Boston. I never felt I wanted for anything . . . because I wasn’t really longing for anything.
That’s the thing about not having a great deal of money. You learn that you actually require very little to keep things interesting. It’s only when you begin to make money that you find yourself thinking you need things you never dreamed of needing before. And once you get those things, you start ruminating about everything else that you don’t have. Then aspirational despair sets in. You find yourself wondering how the hell you got so bound up in the desire to acquire. Because you know that, in feeding the consumerist urge, you’re simultaneously papering over the large fissures in your own life; bluffing yourself into believing all this stuff would quell the doubts and melancholy within.
Money. The trickiest substance in life – as it’s the way we keep score, measure our worth, and think we can control our destinies. Money: the essential lie.
But in those first crazy months when I started working at Freedom Mutual, money seemed like a great new crazy lover who was determined to show me a fresh way of looking at the world. Out with the drab, narrow economies of a frugal life. In with the pleasures of living well and not having to pay a vast amount of attention to the price tag attached.
Money. Much to my continued surprise, I found myself becoming a fast convert to its heady pleasures and the sense of possibility that it engendered.
Money. It was also a game.
Or, at least, that was how Brad Pullman looked upon it.
Brad Pullman was the CEO of Freedom Mutual. He was in his late thirties – a dentist’s son from Long Island and a self-described ‘one-time geek’ who had been settling scores with the world from the moment he discovered Money. He went to Middlebury, then to Harvard Business School, after which he found his way into the ‘secure, low-stress world of mutual funds’.
‘Everything I did in the first thirty years of my life was predicated on risk aversion. I tell you, Jane, fear is Life’s Big Roadblock.’ (Those were his caps, by the way.) ‘It’s the one and only thing that will keep you from achieving all that you want to achieve, or living the life you deserve. And the truly insidious thing about fear is – it’s completely self-perpetuated. We create the dread that clogs up our lives.’
Yes, Brad Pullman did often talk in such self-help-guru outbursts. It was ‘part of the package’, as he put it. He saw himself as a living testament to the ‘Necessity of Overcoming the Negatives’. This doctrine was christened by everyone around the company as NON. ‘I like it,’ Brad said, when he first heard the acronym, ‘except that it’s French – and like any reasonable American, I hate the fucking French.’ Brad himself had applied the NON doctrine to just about everything in his life. He jettisoned his first wife (‘the classic starter marriage’) when her ‘dull negativity’ finally wore out his patience. He jettisoned his trapped suburban-man image, not to mention his fleshy physique. Fifty pounds were stripped from his frame courtesy of a savage diet and an equally savage personal trainer. With his new-found sleekness came his new-found need to play the sartorial dandy.
‘I am happy to admit that, in my 5.4 million-dollar townhouse on Beacon Hill, I have fifty designer suits. Does any man need fifty suits and one hundred and fifty shirts? Don’t be absurd. Fifty suits and one hundred and fifty shirts in a 5.4 million-dollar townhouse is a sign of futile overconsumption . . . until, of course, you do the math. Fifty suits and one hundred and fifty shirts – let’s say the outlay was around 100k over a five-year period, so 20k per annum. Now if you are some mid-level exec pulling down one hundred and 50k per annum before taxes, 20k a year on suits . . . well, it’s virtually a crack-cocaine habit, right? But if you’re pulling down eight million per annum, as I did last year . . .’
That was another thing about Brad Pullman. He not only announced the cost of everything – ‘Like my new watch? Jaeger LeCoultre. Bought at European Watches on Newbury Street. Fifty-four hundred dollars – actually a steal’ – but also let it be known – all the time – how much he was making, how much the firm was making, how much you, his minion, should be making, but aren’t because . . . well, ‘Do you have the juice to Overcome the Negatives and score the big bucks?’
I met Brad Pullman at my interview. I’d found out about the job courtesy of the Harvard Placement Office. After turning down the post in Wisconsin I asked Ms Steele if there were any openings in the world of Big Bucks.
‘Plenty, of course – but you have a Ph.D. in English, so why would you want to—?’
‘It’s a career change,’ I said.
‘Even before your career has started,’ she said.
‘I’ve decided I don’t want to be an academic. So if I’m rejecting university life I might as well go after the best-paid work possible.’
‘Professor Henry wouldn’t have approved,’ she said drily. I managed to stay cool.
‘Professor Henry hated everything about the pettiness of Harvard life – so, in fact, he definitely would have approved.’
‘Well, you certainly knew him better than I did.’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘I did.’
Then I asked her about ‘money jobs’.
‘Well, hedge funds are the big thing now,’ she said. ‘And Boston has become a real hub for them over the past few years. These companies are always looking for entry-level traders, especially from Harvard. The fact that you have a doctorate in literature might baffle them a bit. However, it might also make you more interesting than the other candidates.’
Brad Pullman certainly thought that. Initially I was surprised to find myself being interviewed by the company head honcho for a mere trainee job. But Brad let it be known that, given Freedom Mutual’s deliberately small size (only thirty employees), he was ‘totally hands-on about every aspect of the company. So yeah, I am in on everything from the start. And I like your smarts, so why the hell shouldn’t we have an expert on Dreiser working on the trading floor? The starting salary is one hundred thousand per annum and a twenty-thousand-dollar joining bonus, payable immediately. No problem with that?’
‘None at all.’
‘But it could end up being ten, twenty times that if you turn out to be profitable. You play your cards right with us, you could be set up for life by the time you’re thirty. But before you start here, I’m giving you two thousand bucks and sending you out tomorrow afternoon with Trish Rosenstein – who, with a name like that, doesn’t “summer” at Kennebunkport with the fucking Bushes, but is one ace fund manager and knows how to dress. She’s going to help you buy a new office wardrobe. Conservative, but classy. Right now, you look like you’ve just walked out of the Student Union and are about to eat some organic cookies with a mug of elderflower tea. It might get you hit on at the local health-food shop, but it will compete with the wallpaper here. So, if you want the job, you accept the wardrobe upgrade.’
There was a part of me which listened to this spiel and thought: This is an actor, brilliantly impersonating a sexist dick. The thing was, Brad knew that he was playing this role – and was testing you to see whether you took offense (at which point you’d be out on your ass, because he’d write you off as a prig) or could adapt to his machine-gun repartee, his delight in excessive bullshit. As I listened to him, the English Department drabbie in m
e found herself being curiously subverted by his patter. I’d never met anyone like Brad Pullman before – though, of course, I knew that the type existed. But what surprised me was that his bullshit came across – especially after my interview with the walking mummies at the University of Wisconsin – as both engaging and in touch with the realpolitik of the way we lived now. Yes, it was crass, but there was something weirdly refreshing about such blatant mercantilism. He was an updated version of the sort of swaggering capitalist buccaneer who peopled so many of the naturalist novels I’d studied: a wholly American construct, with a ferocious energy for the combustive engine that was pure capitalism.
‘Are you ready to get into bed with the free market?’ Brad asked me at the end of the interview.
At $100,000 per annum, with another 20 grand up front? Damn right I was.
‘I think so,’ I said, trying to sound demure.
‘That’s the last hesitant statement you make around here. Our world is defined by either a definite “yes” or “no”, with absolutely no ambiguity in between.’
Trish Rosenstein was the definitive embodiment of this Manichean world-view. Though her primary objective was my sartorial reorganization – and Brad had told us both to take the following afternoon off to ‘get the job done’ – once we finished shopping we naturally ended up in the bar of the Four Seasons, trading life stories.
Brad had been spot on about Trish. She had a voice which combined the vowels of Brooklyn with the gaseous honk of a foghorn, a voice designed to turn heads in restaurants, to scare young children and cower domesticated animals. As we set off down Newbury Street, and she escorted me into assorted emporiums of fashion, I found myself thinking: I’m not going to last more than ten minutes with this woman.
‘You don’t wanna try that on,’ she yelled to me as I was looking at a business suit in Banana Republic. ‘Gonna make you look like some anorexic twat.’
Everyone on the floor spun around after she made that pronouncement. And she immediately stared everyone down, shouting: ‘Something I say bother you?’ That silenced the store. Then she turned to me and said: ‘C’mon, let’s find you something classy elsewhere.’
Once we were out on the street, I did say: ‘You know, there was no real need to—’
‘Say what I think? Why the hell not? I didn’t insult anyone back there. I just made a comment.’
‘A very loud comment.’
‘So? I talk loud. It’s how I deal with the world.’
She insisted on dragging me into Armani. ‘The sale’s on, and we might find you something to help you lose the Crunchy Granola look.’
By the end of the afternoon, I had acquired three suits, two pairs of shoes and assorted separates – all stylish, yet simple – and even had $200 left over to blow on underwear. Trish might have had the manners of a stevedore, but she did have an eye for clothes and she certainly knew how to shop – which, as she correctly surmised, was an activity that held little interest for me.
‘Brad circulated your résumé, like he does everybody’s he’s thinking of hiring,’ she told me after directing us into the bar of the Four Seasons Hotel and ordering Martinis – two for herself, the first of which she downed almost at once. ‘We all had you sized up pretty quickly: the smart girl raised in strained circumstances. Your father must be some class of creep, by the way.’
‘What makes you say that?’ I asked.
‘Stop sounding tetchy. It is just a simple deduction. Daddy’s in the copper business, but has jettisoned you and your mother for a new life with a string of South American bimbas, right?’
‘There’ve only been two—’
‘To the best of your knowledge. All men are putzes at heart – even the good ones. But you know that by now, don’t you?’
I looked at her carefully.
‘What do you mean by that?’ I asked.
‘Oh, come on, you don’t think Brad – Mr Micro-Manager – didn’t dig a little bit into your past and find out about you and the Professor?’
I looked at her, appalled.
‘When I applied for a job as a trainee, I didn’t think my past private life would be vetted.’
‘There are three of us in the company who form the vetting committee to make certain we hire someone who will fit into the Freedom Mutual culture. Do you know what we all liked about you – besides the Harvard doctorate and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and not being a snot . . . ?’
‘Enlighten me.’
‘The fact that you had a four-year thing with your thesis advisor and kept it completely out of the public view.’
‘Who told you this?’
‘Do you honestly think I’d reveal our sources? I mean, puleeze. But, between ourselves, Brad was also super-impressed about how you never showed your hand, never stirred the pot, and kept a dignified silence in the wake of his death. What a business, by the way. I really felt for you . . . especially with all the ambiguity surrounding—’
‘I’m leaving now,’ I heard myself saying.
‘Have I said the wrong thing?’
‘Actually you have. Just as I find it completely abhorrent that you and your colleagues have dug into my past and—’
‘We all know each other’s stuff in the office,’ she said. ‘I’m aware that Brad is cheating on his wife with a bond dealer named Samantha who has a nasty temper and frequently scratches his back during sex, causing him to wear a T-shirt in bed with his wife for a few days. Everyone knows that Brad should break it off with her, but he’s addicted to trouble. Just as Brad knows that I’ve been in a relationship with a cop named Pauline for the past two years.’
‘I see,’ I said, trying to sound nonplussed.
‘Go on, act all blasé and inclusive. Pretend you’re not shocked to discover I’m a dyke . . .’
‘It really is your own business.’
‘Not at Freedom Mutual. Brad insists on total transparency. No secrets, no hidden baggage. Everything out in the open. So . . . goon, ask me any question about myself. Anything. You ask, I’ll tell.’
‘I’d rather not.’
‘Loosen up.’
‘All right. Why do you talk so loud?’
‘Good question. And here’s the answer: Because I had a mother who was always screaming at everybody and complained a lot about how life had been one big let-down, and how: “If you want to be really disappointed by things, then you should definitely have children.”’
‘Charming.’
‘That she wasn’t.’
‘She’s dead?’
‘They’re all dead. My dad, my mom, my brother Phil . . .’
‘How old was he when he died?’
‘Nineteen.’
‘Had he been sick?’
‘It was suicide, so, yeah, he’d been sick.’
‘Why did he—?’
‘Hang himself in his bedroom on Christmas Eve 1979 . . . ?’
‘Oh, my word.’
‘Can’t you be American and use “fuck”?’
‘That is just horrible.’
‘Fucking horrible. I was twelve at the time and my big brother was just home from his sophomore year at the University of Pennsylvania. It was a big deal in my family, the first-born – the guy – getting accepted into an Ivy League university, being pre-Med and all that. What my parents didn’t know is that, after a brilliant first year, near straight As, he had some kind of breakdown and suddenly got a C in Biochemistry. Now for anyone who’s pre-Med, a C in Biochemistry is a huge setback. And Mom gets his report card on December 23rd. Having nothing better to do – and being fucking Mom – she begins to do this vast big number on him, saying how he’s a huge disappointment, how she’d given up everything to raise him, and this is how he repaid her. My mom ruined everything – and everyone – she touched. And if I’m sounding like a shrink, well . . . I did do nine years of the talking cure after finding my brother hanging from the clothes rail in his closet.’
‘You found him?’
‘That’s what I said.’
She paused and downed the Martini, then put her hand up for a third one.
‘Not for me,’ I said when she tried to order two.
‘You’re having one – like it or not. Because if there’s one thing I know about life, it’s the fact that everyone needs to get drunk from time to time – even you, Miss Propriety.’
‘Your parents must have been devastated after—’
‘Dad died about six months after Phil. Throat cancer – the payback for forty years of non-stop cigarettes. He was only fifty-six and I’m pretty damn sure that everything started metastasizing after Phil killed himself.’
Trish said she never wavered in dealing with her mother after that. When her mother tried to make phone contact Trish changed her number. When she had an uncle and a second cousin show up at her office to make entreaties, she refused to see them.
‘“Surely you’ll feel terrible if she suddenly dies on you,” they all told me on the phone, to which I could only say: “No, I won’t feel a single iota of guilt.”’
‘And when it finally happened . . . ?’ I asked.
‘That was around three years after my dad went. Mom was driving to the mall near our house in Morristown and had a mild coronary. The car went out of control and crossed over into the oncoming lane, and there was this motherfucker of a truck barreling down the highway – and splat. I was an orphan.’
She downed the dregs of the Martini. Like anyone who was staring down into the bottom of a third Martini, she was seriously smashed. So, for that matter, was I. The difference between us was that, when I spoke, I wasn’t shouting at the top of my lungs.
‘You want to know if I felt guilt afterwards?’ she asked, sounding like she was talking through a megaphone. ‘Of course I felt fucking guilt. The cunt was my fucking mother and even if she was a total scumbag who drove my poor screwed-up brother to lynch himself with a fucking Boy Scout’s belt . . .’
That’s when a guy in a tux showed up at our table, informed us that he was the hotel’s duty manager, and that we were to settle the check and leave the premises immediately.
Leaving the World Page 8